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A home-schooler's journey: Marcellus girl's education is a family affair

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Tasha Gottschalk-Fielding reads a portion of a paper she was writing about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to her mother, Dori, in the kitchen of their home in Marcellus. Tasha, home-schooled since she was 3, is a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist.
(Mike Greenlar | mgreenlar@syracuse.com)

Tasha Gottschalk-Fielding, 17, poses with her mother, Dori; her sister, Alisha, 14; and her father, Bill, in the living room of their home in Marcellus.Mike Greenlar | mgreenlar@syracuse.com

Marcellus, N.Y. -- Three years ago, 14-year-old Tasha Gottschalk-Fielding was reading The Wall Street Journal and came across an item that rubbed her the wrong way.

A Congolese student had gone to court in Belgium to try to ban the book "Tintin in the Congo," calling it racist. Tasha, a longtime Tintin fan, agreed the book was racially insensitive, but knew that was true of many books written prior to the 1960s - including Shakespeare's "Othello" and "The Merchant of Venice."

She wrote a letter to the Journal, arguing against the ban. It was one of four letters published in the paper's May 19, 2010, issue.

A big deal for a 14-year-old? Yes. But in some ways it was just another school day at the Gottschalk-Fielding home in Marcellus.

Tasha, now 17, has been home-schooled since she was 3. Earlier this month, as a high school senior, she was named one of Central New York's 13 semifinalists in the National Merit Scholarship Program, and the only home-schooler. She is one of only nine home-schoolers out of 937 semifinalists statewide this year.

The designation, based on her score on the national PSAT exam, is just the latest indication that what Tasha and her mother, Dori Gottschalk-Fielding, have been doing around their kitchen table every day is working.

The Gottschalk-Fieldings' home-schooling journey began when Tasha - short for Anastasia -- became aware that an older friend was being home-schooled. She asked her mother if they could give it a try.

Dori obliged, spending a half-hour a day with the 3-year-old on what she called "kindergartenish" lessons. After a few weeks, the sessions started getting longer, and the activities more advanced.

By the time Tasha was old enough to go to kindergarten, she was doing third-grade math and was well ahead of her age group in other subjects, too.

"I was afraid she'd be bored if she went to regular school," Dori said.

So she never did.

The decision created what has become a full-time job for Dori, who now home-schools both Tasha and her younger sister, Alisha. Call it parent involvement on steroids.

For 14 years, Dori has planned, scheduled and executed her children's learning, seeking out the best books and backup materials. As Tasha's studies have become more advanced, Dori, who holds a master's degree in ancient Near Eastern languages from Johns Hopkins University, has had to work relentlessly to keep a step ahead.

"Sometimes I feel like I have it all together, and other times I'm still staring at the economics book at 1 a.m., saying, 'I've almost got it, give me half an hour more,'" she said.

All the studying is rewarding, she said; she is fully understanding some of the concepts in subjects like physics that she learned only fleetingly in high school.

This semester Tasha is studying world history, statistics, macroeconomics, chemistry and Spanish - mostly at the college level.

There's a mail-order chemistry kit in the basement, waiting to be used. To keep her conversational Spanish fresh, Tasha has weekly Skype sessions with a native speaker the family knows in New England.

The family's devotion to learning is evident as soon as you walk into their home on a wooded 2 1/2 acres on Amnaste Road. A wall in the living room is lined with books, most of which Tasha has read. Altogether the family has about 2,000 books in the house - and no television.

Dori and Bill Gottschalk-Fielding met during their freshman year at Cornell. They married a few years after graduation and decided to act on their Christian beliefs with some unusual family planning: They would have one child of their own and adopt a second one in need.

Five years after Tasha was born, they adopted Alisha, then 2, from an orphanage in Bangalore, India.

Bill, a former pastor who is now director of connectional ministries for the Upper New York conference of the United Methodist Church, said the decision to home-school the girls was not primarily driven by their faith. But Dori said she has thrown some Bible study into the mix, particularly when Tasha was younger.

On a recent day, Tasha sat at the kitchen table, putting the finishing touches on her latest world history assignment - a 20-page, 40-source paper examining the accuracy of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's predictions about world events. Alisha was in the living room taking a math quiz. Dori split her time between the two.

Tasha's day typically includes two sessions of formal schooling - what the family calls "table school" - from 8 to 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The rest of the day is filled with internships, field trips, reading or other projects.

She has two internships. One is at the Seward House in Auburn, where she helps with collections and sometimes works the front desk. Two years ago, she researched Victorian-era games and developed an event where children played them. She tied the activity to Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" anti-obesity initiative.

She recently began an internship with her state assemblyman, Gary Finch. On her first day, she cut out newspaper articles involving Finch's constituents and sent them congratulatory notes.

She says she has no regrets about missing out on high school.

"I've always had friends though my home-school groups we've gone to and my (church) youth group as well," she said in her soft but earnest voice. "As for sports, I took horse-back riding for quite a few years."

Much of her free time is spent around the house. She is a voracious reader - her favorite book is Tolstoy's hefty classic "Anna Karenina," and she is a big fan of Jane Austen. At the moment she's reading an Agatha Christie mystery.

Her hobbies include making dollhouse miniatures and collecting old vinyl records by artists like Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald. She also enjoys working in the yard and playing board games with her sister.

When the Gottschalk-Fieldings lived in Ithaca, they belonged to a thriving home-schooling group connected with the Christian organization Loving Education at Home, or LEAH. Tasha played soccer with children from the group and took classes with them in art history and investing.

There's a smaller contingent of home-schoolers in Marcellus - last year the district had 33 home-schooled children in grades K-12 from 14 families.

Home-schooling has been growing nationally. The most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that about 1.5 million American children - or 2.9 percent -- were home-schooled in 2007, up 74 percent from eight years earlier. About 36 percent were home-schooled primarily for religious reasons, the center said.

Home-schooled children in New York don't have to take any state standardized tests or Regents exams, and Tasha doesn't. The family must submit a plan of study to the school district at the beginning of each year, then file quarterly reports and a final assessment, including the results of a nationally normed standardized test.

The most recent test results Tasha submitted to the Marcellus district were for the SATs. She scored 2,330 out of 2,400 - including a perfect 800 in writing, 790 in critical reading and 740 in math. That put her in the top 0.5 percent of SAT-takers nationally.

To broaden Tasha's and Alisha's experiences beyond the kitchen table, the family takes frequent outings, including a week each summer at a seminar at the Chautauqua Institution, where they go to concerts, art shows and lectures.

Tasha has taken two online classes - a writing course for gifted students through Stanford University when she was in middle school and a course about ancient Egypt offered by the University of Missouri for gifted high school seniors. She took the latter course when she was in seventh grade.

Last summer she accompanied her dad on a trip to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress to maintain anti-malaria funding.

She has applied early-decision to Cornell, where she hopes to major in American Studies and then go to law school. She is entertaining the thought of going into politics after that; she is particularly interested in strengthening regulations to protect the environment.

Who are the National Merit Scholarship semifinalists in New York state? You can find out by going to our database of 2013 recipients. Select "homeschool" under school and you'll see the other home-schooled recipients. You also can search by name, school and community.